The Fair Work Ombudsman is taking a labour hire company to court for unlawfully deducting $500 fines from migrant workers' pay when they breached its drug and alcohol policy.
The FWC's bid to develop an award clause removing impediments to working from home looks to be a slow burn, with a hearing likely next June following a possible employee survey.
The MEU has opened up another front in its continuing battles with BHP, claiming in a new Federal Court case that the mining giant is breaching award provisions by failing to give its Operations Services in-house labour hire workforce Christmas and Boxing Day off and not seeking majority support for regular shifts in excess of 10 hours.
The FWC has moved a step closer to curtailing the lowest pay classification in awards from January 1, inviting comment on draft determinations that ensure it is used only for a short period of induction and training.
FWC president Adam Hatcher will convene a directions hearing next month into the Commission's own-initiative case to develop a "workable" award clause that removes impediments to working from home.
Employers and unions have confirmed the gulf that exists over 'right to disconnect' laws that come into force today, the former lamenting a lack of FWC guidance on "reasonable" contact and forecasting "conflict and disharmony", while the latter hailed the new provisions as "reclaiming the right to knock off".
A FWC panel has declined to offer its own methodology for assessing gender-based undervaluation of work after employers and unions involved in its consideration of five female-dominated awards failed to agree on engaging an independent expert to do the job.
The FWC will hear an employer application to vary the SCHADS award's sleepover allowance alongside a group of unions, but will exclude parts of the unions' draft determination that "go beyond the scope" of the original application.
A FWC full bench has chosen to include in an intractable bargaining workplace determination a delegates' rights provision that closely reflects the model award term, rather than the more extensive clause sought by the TWU.
The Federal Court has imposed a record penalty on a sushi restaurant chain to "disabuse" employers of the notion that penalties for underpayments are "an acceptable cost of doing business" and recommended that the Fair Work Ombudsman refer its chief executive's potential flouting of tax and migration laws to the ATO, Department of Home Affairs and ASIC.
